Oren Meyers

What is good journalism? comparing Israeli public and journalists' perspectives:

The frequent referencing of service to the public interest as a core professional journalistic value raises the question of the correspondence between the perception of journalists and the public as to what constitutes good and bad journalism. In this study, a sample of Israeli journalists and a sample of the Israeli public were asked a series of questions about the core values and practices of journalism. Results suggest four major conclusions: first, Israeli journalists have a clear, relatively uniform perception of what constitutes worthy journalism. Second, journalists and the public differ in the degrees of significance they assign to various journalistic norms and practices. Third, the public is slightly more positive in its overall assessment of the Israeli media in comparison with the journalists. Finally, the two general assessments are constituted by different, or even opposing, components.

Memory and digital media : six dynamics of the globital memory field

Neda Agha Soltan, a young Iranian woman, was shot dead on June 22, 2009 on the streets of Tehran during protests following the Iranian June elections. Her death was digitally witnessed by a friend nearby using a camera phone: the data then went viral. He emailed the data to another friend in the Netherlands. The camera phone video was uploaded to a number of websites; within hours still images from the video were captured, printed out, and used in protests at her killing and at the results of the Iranian elections in cities around the world, including Los Angeles, New York, and Vienna. The next day, Neda’s dying images were broadcast by major television companies and made worldwide headlines including newspapers in Britain, the US, and Australia. The image of Neda’s face, covered in blood, was recolored, reconfigured, and reassembled across multiple media forms. The witness video prompted the creation of a number of memorial websites, a Twitter icon, a number of Facebook groups, two Wiki pages, memorial art works, and songs commemorating Neda’s life and death.

The sound-track of memory: Ashes and Dust and the commemoration of the Holocaust in Israeli popular culture

The article investigates the 1988 music album Efer Veavak (in English: Ashes and Dust) that was created by Yehuda Poliker and Ya’akov Gilad, two Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivor parents. The article’s findings suggest that the Holocaust story as told through Ashes and Dust emphasizes individual aspects rather than collective lessons and that there is a growing sensitivity to the issue of memory preservation. Moreover, Ashes and Dust highlights the notion that the survivors’ children are now the bearers of Holocaust memory, and that it is through them that the Holocaust becomes an Israeli story about the present, rather than only a diaspora story about the past. These tendencies are amplified by the fact that Ashes and Dust is a popular cultural product. The public use of the songs through radio broadcasting has in many cases caused them to be assimilated into the mainstream and has blurred their initial identification as markers of a singular event, the Holocaust.

Tuned to the nation's mood: Popular music as a mnemonic cultural object

This article explores the concept of sonic memory via the investigation of popular music that constitutes a radio playlist. Our case study focuses on the songs aired on Israel’s Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism during the state’s first decade of local-commercial radio broadcasting (1993–2002). The critical analysis sought to understand what makes certain songs so identifiable with the national mourning ritual and the ways in which such songs gain the authority to symbolize and shape social memories. The article deconstructs the songs’ commemorative authority through three primary questions: (1) What is one permitted to sing about when addressing the Holocaust in popular music? (2) Who is permitted to sing or write about it? (3) How are those individual artists permitted to sing about the Holocaust within the context of popular music? The findings suggest that the authority of the songs as ‘cultural objects’ is derived from a complex combination of their quiet tone and slow tempo, the biographies of their creators and performers, and their lyrics, written by poets who embrace a philosophical-existential point of view. Beyond this analysis, the article seeks to understand the power and efficacy of popular music as a cultural object.

Setting the collective memory agenda: Examining mainstream media influence on individuals’ perceptions of the past:

Memory studies scholars tend to stress the significance of the media in shaping collective memories. This study offers a quantitative–empirical examination of this phenomenon. Applying a “memory-setting” research design, inspired by agenda-setting theory, the study examines correlations between the “media memory-agenda” and “public memory-agenda,” to illuminate the influence of the media on the shaping of collective perceptions of the past. Findings point at a significant correlation between media and public memory-agendas, one that increases during periods of heightened coverage of past events. On the individual level, the role of media exposure to commemorative content is significant, surpassing that of direct participation in public commemoration. At the same time, some of the findings point to the resiliency of the public memory-agenda. Therefore, the study’s findings offer a novel understanding of the role of mass media in shaping collective memory, as well as the limits to its influence.

Past Continuous: Newsworthiness and the Shaping of Collective Memory

This study explores the multi-layered interrelations between the production of news and collective remembering. We investigate this phenomenon by analyzing television newscasts aired on Israels Memorial Day for the Holocaust and Heroism (MDHH), 1994–2007. These newscasts provide a rich research corpus because they stand at the intersection between two types of rituals: the everyday ritual of newsmaking, and the national commemorative ritual, for which the media serves as a main site of articulation. The article implements a “zoom in” perspective: first, we examine the broadcasting schedules, exploring the role of newscasts in the process of leading the audiences in and out of the commemorative ritual. Next, we suggest a typology distinguishing between (a) items dealing with current events, (b) commemorative items focusing on Holocaust remembrance, and (c) dog whistle items that are “attuned” to the specific cultural ear and thus enable mundane news items to be interpreted as related to Holocaust commemoration. We argue that the dual aim of the items featured in MDHH newscasts–to provide both news values and commemorative values–leads to the construction of “reversed memory,” a narrative that commemorates past events (the “there and then”) by narrating present events (the “here and now”). Reversed memory commemorates the difficult past through the achievements of the present, and thus not only eases the collective confrontation with painful traumas, but rather avoids this encounter altogether.

Structuring the Sacred: Media Professionalism and the Production of Mediated Holocaust Memory

In this study, the authors explore the considerations that guide media organizations when they narrate the past. To operationalize this research interest, the authors interviewed 10 senior Israeli electronic media professionals about the production processes that shape the broadcasts of electronic media on Israels Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism. The analysis of the interviews illuminates the constructed and negotiated (rather than natural and inherent) nature of media professionalism.

CONTEXTUALIZING ALTERNATIVE JOURNALISM

The article explores the ways in which the weekly Haolam Hazeh (Hebrew for This World) earned its reputation as the definitive “designated maverick” of Israeli journalism during the 1950s and 1960s. It does so via an investigation of the journalistic practices through which Haolam Hazeh constructed a first-of-its kind model of critical Israeli journalism combining a seemingly clashing mix of radical politics, investigative reporting, sensationalism, and sexually explicit contents. The self-positioning of Haolam Hazeh as a maverick publication, as well as its corresponding positioning by the Israeli mainstream journalistic community, delineated the professional ethos, inner conflicts and boundaries of that journalistic community in that era. Moreover, analysis of Haolam Hazehs journalistic formula illuminates the dynamic and contextual nature of the relations between mainstream and alternative media.

The journalistic structure of feeling: An exploration of career life histories of Israeli journalists:

The study explores 33 occupational life histories of current and former Israeli journalists. By doing so, it enables us to better understand how the fundamental changes that the journalistic profession underwent during recent decades shaped and influenced the occupational progression of Israeli journalists. Our interviews validate previous work on the partial professional standing of journalism showing that individuals enter journalism in a protracted and uneven manner. In addition, the analysis of modes of reasoning for entering journalism charts the informal boundaries of overt journalistic political identification. Finally, an exploration of self-narrated occupational highs and lows shows that career highs are always identified as personal achievements while career lows are mostly narrated as outcomes of larger organizational or institutional constraints. The current chaotic nature of journalism organizations, as reflected in our life history corpus, illustrates an environment in which there is a clear disconnect between actions and rewards.

Expanding the scope of paradigmatic research in journalism studies: The case of early mainstream Israeli journalism and its discontents

This article argues that existing scholarship on paradigmatic crises in journalism neglects some of the fundamental dynamics that were explored in Kuhn’s original work. In order to fully conceptualize the creation and alteration of news paradigms, journalism scholars ought to study ‘paradigmatic challenges’: the multifaceted ways by which journalistic communities react to planned, methodical, and continuous challenges that offer comprehensive paradigmatic alternatives to existing core professional convictions. To operationalize this research interest, the article explores a salient case study: the multi-dimensional response of early Israeli mainstream journalism to the paradigmatic challenge posed by the radical and sensational weekly Haolam Hazeh.